Are the locks everyone actually buys any good? Not the exotic stuff in security forums — the deadbolt on your door, the padlock on your shed, the $8 impulse buy hanging by the checkout at the hardware store.
The honest answer showed up in about four minutes. That's roughly how long it took to open my own front door with a pick set bought online for less than a pizza, after about a week of practice. That wasn't skill. That's the standard.
A lot of what gets sold as security is sold on the assumption that nobody will ever test it. Manufacturers don't publish pick times. Retailers don't either. The grading standard printed on the box hasn't meaningfully moved in decades, and it still passes locks that open in under a minute.
So this site collects what's actually known about them — how they fail, how fast, and whether the price tag is buying you anything — and puts it somewhere readable.
Plenty of review sites imply that every product on them has been through a workshop. That's almost never true, and it's worth being straight about it here, because it changes how you should read any given page.
Some of these locks have been in my hands. Bought, picked, raked, bumped, shimmed, and in some cases cut apart. Those pages carry the details that only come from a bench: what the pins actually feel like, where the tolerances are sloppy, how long it really took.
Some of them haven't. A $400 high-security cylinder, a 300lb gun safe, a smart lock that just launched — those aren't things one person can buy on a whim. Those pages are built from published test data, manufacturer specs and standards documents, teardown footage, locksmith and locksport sources who do this professionally, and ANSI/BHMA grading. When the coverage is research-led rather than hands-on, the page says so.
The testing queue is limited by exactly one thing: money. Locks are expensive and most of them don't survive. That's why the hands-on pile grows slowly, and why reader-sent locks genuinely move it along.
Whether a lock is on the bench or on paper, it gets held to the same questions: how it resists picking and raking, whether it's vulnerable to bumping, shimming or a known bypass, what a destructive attack costs in time and noise, how the housing and mounting hold up, and whether any of that is worth what it costs.
Where a time is published on this site, it's the slowest successful attempt, not the luckiest one — and it's attributed to whoever produced it.
There are only three real ways to fund a site like this: charge readers, sell rankings, or take a commission on links. NoPryZone takes the commission.
Some links here go to Amazon and other retailers, and a purchase through one pays this site a small cut at no extra cost to you. Nothing is paywalled and nothing is gated behind an account.
The obvious risk is that commission quietly bends recommendations upward. What holds that line is the ledger below, plus the fact that some of the most-read pages here — the worst locks at Home Depot, the Defiant deadbolt teardown — exist purely to talk you out of buying something. There's no commission in that. That's rather the point.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
A review site is only worth reading if you know exactly what it will and won't take. So here's the whole list, in public, permanently.
Manufacturer samples — held to the same rubric as anything bought at retail, and labelled as a sample on the page they appear on.
Reader-sent locks. The drawer lock nobody has a key for, the deadbolt you replaced, the garage-sale oddity. Same rubric, and you get no say in the verdict.
Affiliate commission on retailer links — paid by the retailer, at no cost to you, with no influence on ranking.
Corrections from anyone, manufacturers included, when they arrive with evidence. The fix and its date get logged on the page.
Sponsored reviews and paid rankings. No position on any list here has ever been bought. There is no price.
Copy preview. No advance read, no fact-check pass, no quote approval. Nobody sees a verdict before you do.
Embargoes and timing conditions. Publication happens when the work is finished, not when a calendar says so.
Returning the unit. Samples that reach the bench usually end up drilled, cut, or in pieces. That's the test.
Guaranteed coverage. A sample buys a place in the queue. It doesn't buy a review, and it certainly doesn't buy a verdict.
If a condition is attached to a sample, the answer is no — the unit gets bought at retail and covered anyway.
One person. Every page, every teardown, every bad joke in a photo caption. There's no editorial team and no freelancer pool.